NEW YORK - U.S. oil output from seven major shale formations is expected to rise 84,000 barrels per day (bpd) in March to a record of about 8.4 million bpd, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on Tuesday. The largest change is forecast in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where output is expected to climb by 43,000 bpd to a record 4.024 million bpd in March. A shale revolution has helped boost the United States to the position of world's biggest crude oil producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Overall crude production...

While driving at night through Counselor, on U.S. 550, the horizon takes on a dusky illumination, almost like daylight, said Samuel Sage, a member of the Navajo Nation’s Counselor Chapter House, at a news conference. Bright light flares from natural gas being burned off as part of oil and gas production have become increasingly common in northwestern New Mexico, particularly since 2013 said Sage. Sage was among several environmental advocates who gathered at the state Capitol in support of a bill that, if passed, would create a four-year moratorium on any new state permits for hydraulic fracturing — a type...

The Alpine High has always been there — well, it’s been there for several hundred million years, anyway — just waiting for the right team of scientists to come along and find it. As things turned out, it took a team staffed by people with little or no prior experience in the Permian/Delaware Basin to make the discovery. I first interviewed Keenan in August, 2016, shortly after Apache had made the initial announcement of the major new discovery, for a piece published on Forbes.com. During that interview, Keenan pointed to his team’s lack of previous experience in the region as...

One of the most prominent and politically active left-wing think tanks in the United States, the Center for American Progress, has announced that it will no longer accept funding from the United Arab Emirates, the Guardian reported Friday. “With a rising undemocratic tide around the world, and serious questions about which side of that struggle our own president stands on, it seemed clear that all Americans should take extra steps and leave no doubt where they stand,” a spokesperson for the liberal organization told the Guardian. The spokesperson added, “This funding never impacted any CAP position or policy, but everybody...

The United States is expected to churn out far more oil in 2019 than what international analysts originally forecasted. The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based organization that helps coordinate energy policies for industrial countries, released its latest oil market report Friday, noting exceptional numbers for the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The agency reported U.S. oil production is expected to rise by 1.3 million barrels a day in 2019. While this number is lower than the record-smashing 2.1 million increase producers enjoyed in 2018, it’s more than double what the IEA initially expected to see in 2019. The forecast illustrates the...

Fact Check: Left-wing extremists in the American environmental movement have never met a carbon-based fuel they like, despite the fact that were it not for carbon-based fuels, we would all still be living in the 19th-century. Their narrative, of course, is that all carbon-based energy is bad, and that the United States in particular, with our outsized economy and radically improved quality of life, is destroying the planet with our carbon emissions. Except that we’re not.

CONVERSE COUNTY, Wyo. — The parade of trailer trucks rolling through Jay Butler’s dusty ranch is a precursor to a new fracking boom on the vast federal lands of Wyoming and across the West. Reversing a trend in the final years of the Obama presidency, the Trump administration is auctioning off millions of acres of drilling rights to oil and gas developers, a central component of the White House’s plan to work hand in glove with the industry to promote more domestic energy production. Seeing growth and profit opportunities at a time of rising oil prices and a pro-business administration,...

Move over, Russia — and Saudi Arabia, too: The United States is now the world’s largest producer of crude oil. “US crude-oil production exceeded that of Saudi Arabia for the first time in more than two decades,” the US Energy Information Administration reported Tuesday. “In June and August, the United States surpassed Russia in crude-oil production for the first time since February 1999.” That assessment confirms an International Energy Agency prediction in March that America would soon be No. 1, and it should keep that slot through 2019, at least. Thanks to the fracking boom, US oil production has topped...

SALT LAKE CITY — The progressive activists who gathered in Utah two weeks ago to strategize for the midterm elections could each recall a moment when they realized the Democratic Party was their foe and decided to quit it. For Kenneth Mejia, 27, who ran for Congress as a Democratic write-in candidate two years ago, it happened when the party declined to include policies that inspire him — like single payer health care and a ban on fracking — in its 2016 party platform. For Diane Moxley, 49, who canvassed for Barack Obama in 2008, it was when the Occupy...

Fledgling companies, many backed by private equity, are rushing to help shale drillers deal with one of their trickiest problems: what to do with the vast volumes of wastewater that are a byproduct of fracking wells...Moving water by pipe costs anywhere from 60 cents to $1.50 a barrel compared with more than $2 by truck...

After several cash-lean budget years that prompted spending cuts and other austerity measures, a big revenue boom has hit New Mexico. State lawmakers will have an estimated $1.2 billion in “new” money available in the coming budget year due to unprecedented oil production levels and overall economic growth, according to new revenue figures released today by legislative and executive economists. “This spike is unprecedented,” Legislative Finance Committee chief economist Jon Clark told members of a key legislative panel during a meeting in Taos. “We’re relying on the oil industry more than we ever have before.” The eye-opening revenue figure —...

Ending a five-year moratorium, the Trump administration Wednesday took a first step toward opening 1.6 million acres of California public land to fracking and conventional oil drilling, triggering alarm bells among environmentalists. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said it’s considering new oil and natural gas leases on BLM-managed lands in Fresno, San Luis Obispo and six other San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast counties. Meanwhile, activists in San Luis Obispo are pushing a ballot measure this fall to ban fracking and new oil exploration in the county. If BLM goes ahead with the plan, it would mark the first...

... The event I refer to is the drilling of the first well which would use hydraulic fracturing to crack shale rock, thereby releasing the gas beneath the rock. Put differently, it was 20 years ago that “fracking” was born. ... The volumes of natural gas, natural gas liquids, and crude oil that this technique has uncovered all over the country have been unfathomable, and over the last decade alone has caused the United States to more than double their crude oil production on an absolute basis, and to surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia in production on a relative basis....

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies. Of course, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.Somehow, improved technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the...

The success of this marriage would unlock oil in tight oil and shale oil deposits that had previously been too expensive to recover, and would result in one of the greatest oil booms the world had ever seen. In fact, the "fracking revolution" caused U.S. oil production to turn upward in 2009, and then rise over the next seven years at the fastest rate in U.S. history. While it is still true that OPEC still produced 42.6% of the world's oil in 2017, the majority of new oil production since 2008 has come from the U.S.It is hard to overstate...

The energy sector had been shielded from pressure to innovate by high oil prices. When prices fell 75% over 20 months beginning in 2014, oil and gas companies were finally forced to modernize to squeeze out profits. Many found they could use new technologies to do the work better and cheaper, with fewer people.

One Trump Administration achievement has been liberating U.S. energy producers of all kinds from federal shackles. Companies have responded with jobs and investment, but all of a sudden the Administration wants to do a Barack Obama imitation and play energy favorites. The National Security Council on Friday reviewed a 41-page internal memo, leaked to Bloomberg News, suggesting that President Trump invoke emergency authority to require grid operators to buy nuclear and coal power. But there’s no emergency, and the political intervention will do more harm than good. *** The supposed problem is that the U.S. is producing an abundance of...

Not to distract from the eye-popping salaries of top energy executives, but there is something else eye-opening about comparing oil and gas CEOs to the average oil and gas worker. The median workers at these companies, at least the ones producing most of natural gas in Pennsylvania, are doing quite well. Yes, they still might earn 100 times less than their CEOs, but just try sneezing at these median compensation numbers. •CNX Resources: $129,390 •Range Resources: $123,500 •Chesapeake Energy: $118,761 •Southwestern Energy: $108,458 •EQT: $102,470 •Cabot Oil & Gas: $75,891 With about 8,500 employees among them, these Marcellus Shale operators...

A recent media report on a peer-reviewed study based on 180 samples from water wells near Ohio fracking sites was headlined: “Univ. of Cincy fracking study finds surprising groundwater results.” What exactly was so surprising? The report is one of more than two dozen scientific studies published since 2010 that concluded fracking is not a major threat to groundwater. No fewer than 10 peer-reviewed studies examining more than 3,000 water wells across virtually every major U.S. shale play have been released in the past five years, with each one finding no evidence of that fracking has contaminated groundwater. The reason?...

Trump Opens Door to Dangerous Fracking in Northern Arizona A new Trump administration plan proposes to auction off 4,200 acres of public land for oil and gas development in northern Arizona. The lands straddle the Little Colorado River, are within three miles of Petrified Forest National Park, and are near habitat for a federally threatened fish called the Little Colorado spinedace. Drilling and fracking would threaten to deplete and pollute groundwater in the Little Colorado River Basin. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is planning the September auction—which would convey development rights to fossil-fuel companies—without any site-specific public or environmental...